Letters to the Editor
NineNine
Published Letters: 7 Editor's Choice: 2
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Flying is efficient, according to this article!
[Read the article: You are now free to pollute about the country]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yet even on today's full flights with passengers crammed into small seats, flying packs a big climate punch. For a long trip, like a transatlantic flight on an average-size plane, each passenger is responsible for sending .39 pounds of CO2 per mile into the atmosphere, according to the World Resources Institute's Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative. By that measure, flying direct from Denver to London and back puts about 3,600 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere, equivalent to driving a Toyota Prius hybrid 10,000 miles.
Assuming one could drive a Toyota Prius in a straight line from Denver to London (which is impossible), the distance is 4680 miles. 4680 x 2 [round trip] = 9360 miles. 9360 miles, assuming it was possible, or desirable (anybody want to drive a Toyota Prius for a week straight to get from Denver to London?).
I'd say that air travel sounds relatively efficient, if you ask me. -
News?
[Read the article: A wireless touch-screen iPod. A video Nano. And a much cheaper iPhone]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Why is this in Salon? Why is this the lead... well... "article" for lack of a better word? A product advertisement on a blog? This is patently absurd. If Salon ever wants to gain me (and I'm sure, many other people) as a subscriber, Salon should get back to publishing even marginally intelligent things that are worth reading.
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Good, but pointless
[Read the article: Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As other people have pointed out, this is an interesting article, but the important thing right now is that the majority of the country wake up and we elect some truly competent, intelligent representatives with some kind of moral decency. Unfortunately, this will never happen unless people admit that most of the people in the US are fucking stupid.
It's gotta be said. We've got just about everything short of a video tape of George Bush saying "Let's bomb Iraq. Halliburton and Exxon are paying me a fortune to do this.", yet still, the majority of people in this country both:
A. Believe the utter nonsense coming out of their television sets
and
B. Are brutal savages who see no moral problems with wholesale slaughter of other human beings
It really does boil down to the fact that the majority of Americans will never wake up and smell the coffee, so to speak, because they can't even form a simple thought. They're too busy talking to invisible, make-believe entities, or spending their money.
Unfortunately, I see no way, short of massive investment in public education (which the governments have no interest in doing, for obvious reasons), to turn this country around right now. As with most people reading this article, ultimately, I too have to say "so what?" at this point. The people who still believe in leprechauns, Jesus, and George Bush are never going to have the brain capacity to reason in any meaningful way.
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TV: The new class divider
[Read the article: TV's triumphant overclass]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One thing that I'd be interested in reading that I haven't seen done properly is the growing movement of people who have realized that *everything* on modern TV is garbage. The quality of TV either has declined drastically, or it's stayed the same, and there are more of us waking up to realize it.
Growing up, I couldn't image a home setting without a TV. I didn't know a single person that didn't leave a TV on in their house, sometimes multiple TV's, during all waking hours.
Today, in all honesty, the only people I know who watch TV of any kind are my parents. I don't know a single person, other than them, that watches TV (in the sense of broadcast TV or cable).
This is striking. There's something going as more and more of us move online (and outside!) to get our entertainment, and don't consume any TV whatsoever. As fewer people watch TV, guess who the die-hard viewers are: lower and middle class, less educated people. That's why now, TV as a concept is becoming more absurd with each passing season (especially the concept of cable TV... paying a monopoly to pipe advertising into your house! That's crazy!).
Expect TV to be even more crude and dumbed down in the future, as TV's viewing audience continues to shrink, and compartmentalize (ie: poor and/or undereducated).